Due to the increasing costs associated with heating homes and other buildings, efforts have been made to develop a practical and inexpensive means for providing more heat in one room of a house or other building than in the other rooms of the house. Heating only those rooms of a home where additional heat is wanted permits the remainder of the home to be heated less, and the costs of heating the home are reduced. Prior art auxiliary heaters include conventional electrical space heaters. Many common space heaters are impractical because they are inefficient and because they may not provide sufficient heat.
Other prior art heaters for these applications include auxiliary electric heating device adapted to be mounted in a section of the heating ducts of a hot air or forced air heating system. These electrical heating means provide for increasing the temperature of the air flowing through these heating ducts and thereby increasing the temperature in a selected room or rooms of a house. An example of such an auxiliary heater is illustrated in the Eisele U.S. Pat. No. 3,025,382, issued Mar. 13, 1962.
One of the features of these prior art devices is that installation normally requires removal of a portion of the heating duct and then installation of the auxiliary heater into the heating duct. Such installation will commonly require the expertise of a mechanical contractor. These auxiliary heating devices also include electrical heating elements and electrically operated control systems, and normally an electrical contractor must be employed to wire the electrical heating elements and to provide electrical connections for the various heat control or thermostat systems.
Attention is also directed to Cotts U.S. Pat. No. 2,839,659 illustrating a heat diffuser adapted to be used as a means for diffusing air coming out of a hot air heat duct, the heat diffuser also including an electrical heating element to further heat the air coming through the air duct.
The prior art also includes electrical baseboard heaters of the type including elongated electric heating elements and functioning by means of convection to heat the air in a room. More specifically, such heaters include means for supporting an elongated electrical heating element including a plurality of heat transfer fins or vanes. Air moves by means of convection through the heat transfer vanes. These heating devices may also require costly installation and have the further disadvantage of being economically inefficient. They also often fail to provide effective circulation of the heated air in the room.